![\"BegumNA.jpg\"](\"http:\/\/www.sepiamutiny.com\/sepia\/BegumNA.jpg\")
<\/p>\n\nSo moving right along, the other thing that has me alternating between \u00c2\u201camused\u00c2\u201d and \u00c2\u201cseething with badly suppressed rage\u00c2\u201d is the gay scene\u00c2\u2014or lack thereof\u00c2\u2014in Karachi. Actually, that\u00c2\u2019s not entirely accurate. The socialising angle of being homosexual in Pakistan is an issue in and of itself, but the serious drama ensuing from the social angle is enough to make me start hurling kitten pumps right, left and centre at any and every queen unfortunate enough to cross my path.\n<\/p>\n\n
When I was growing up in Pakistan, being gay went beyond just being taboo; it was one of those \u00c2\u201cdon\u00c2\u2019t even think the word\u00c2\u201d concepts, kind of like Dubya, only with, you know, actual concepts and not all conceivable mental processes. And over the years it started getting a bit better, but that coincided with growing up, with getting to know other gay men (and one and a half lesbians), with a slightly more liberal government regime, that sort of thing.<\/p>\n\n
But regardless of anything else, there was a substantial lack of a sense of entitlement, of feeling that your parents, friends etc., were obligated to accept and tolerate your particular peccadilloes, whatever those may have been. Drinking, smoking, partying, fucking men\u00c2\u2014they were all lumped together in an odd smorgasbord of \u00c2\u201cif you\u00c2\u2019re going to do it, you make damn\u00c2\u2019 sure that no one in a position of familial authority finds out\u00c2\u201d, although the first three occasionally got a free pass, depending on how \u00c2\u201cfast\u00c2\u201d and \u00c2\u201cliberal\u00c2\u201d the family in question was. [In case anyone\u00c2\u2019s interested, there were a fair number of such clans.]What amazed me most when I moved back to Karachi initially, was the degree of openness with which everything functioned. And it still continues to astound me. Alcohol\u00c2\u2019s not a guilty pleasure (much) any more; there are queens prancing about all over the place<\/a>, and just the other day, I was listening to a young gay man tell me about how, when coming out to his mother, he (and I quote) told her to \u00c2\u201cpiss off and leave [him] the fuck alone\u00c2\u201d.<\/p>\n\n More than anything else, I was astonished at the fact that he hadn\u00c2\u2019t spent the week following this statement collecting his teeth from around the room in which this statement was uttered. I mean, it\u00c2\u2019s not like my mother\u00c2\u2019s violent, but my \u00c2\u201cgeneration\u00c2\u201d\u00c2\u2014and I undoubtedly generalise here\u00c2\u2014would find this sort of thing conceptually inconceivable: not just coming out to a parent, but saying it like that. I\u00c2\u2019m pretty certain that my [hypothetical] grand-children would be counting the bruises well into their teens had I said anything along those lines to my mother.<\/p>\n\n I do realise this isn\u00c2\u2019t necessarily \u00c2\u201cnewsworthy\u00c2\u201d\u00c2\u2026\u00c2\u201cYouth of Today Not Like Youth of Yesteryear\u00c2\u201d is hardly an earth-shattering realisation, and it may well remain irrelevant to the vast majority of people who read this site. And believe me, I understand. I just don\u00c2\u2019t understand the sense of\u00c2\u2014entitlement, for lack of a better word\u00c2\u2014that these gosh-darned kids walk around sporting. I mean, when I came out to my friends at\u00c2\u2026hmm\u00c2\u2026lawks, when I was 12 or so, and finally got onto the Internet at the age of 16, I spent all of time talking to people living in the US and the UK, becoming friends with men and women several years older than me. I also ended up empathising with them immensely\u00c2\u2014many had either lived through the 80s AIDS crisis, or were close to someone who had, and the whole \u00c2\u201csilence = death\u00c2\u201d motif really resonated with me.<\/p>\n\n Which all comes full-circle in that even while at university in the US, I found myself Personally, I hate the idea of assimilation (although I continue to think that the Borg are rather wickedly cool), and \u00c2\u201cnormalisation\u00c2\u201d will lead to sputters of indignance on my part (so much so that I was once asked at a campus Pride meeting whether I was planning to hack up a hairball). Yet at the same time, I feel that there has to be basic cognizance of the fact that in a primarily theocratic society\u00c2\u2014leaving cultural mores aside for the time being\u00c2\u2014very few people, myself included, are capable of really overturning the status quo, especially with regards to an issue that most people couldn\u00c2\u2019t give much of a fuck about. It is very much a matter of undermining the system from within, and all of a sudden, decades of work are being rapidly undone by Hello Kitty Princesses with too much attitude and not enough sense to realise that despite their oh-so-urbane and so-wildly-cosmopolitan exposure and airs, they\u00c2\u2019re still living in a country where being found making out with someone of the same gender could leave them steaming in a pile of shit so high that the entire nation could use it as fertiliser.<\/p>\n\n I sound like a complete uncle-ji, I know. And I\u00c2\u2019m not doing a very good job of explaining my ire, but let me try for an abbreviated (and somewhat clich\u00c3\u00a9d) version: what\u00c2\u2019s with all the people losing their grips on (admittedly unpleasant and far-from-ideal) reality? I\u00c2\u2019m using homosexuality as an illustrative example here, but it\u00c2\u2019s not just the homos and the dykes; it\u00c2\u2019s the drinkers, the coke whores who, umm hello it went out in the 80s and just is NOT cool any more, the little shits who believe that because they watch MTV 24\/7, that somehow grants them the latitude to go out and splatter other people all over the city. I look around at Karachi, or even Lahore, and I see cities and an entire generation spiralling out of control madly. Sometimes you can practically feel<\/em> the whole thing unravelling like a cheap pashmina, and you wonder where the subsuming of a functional identity is going to leave everyone. I mean, kudos to Begum Nawazish Ali (pictured and linked above) for getting to pull a tranny routine on TV, but how necessary is it to reiterate the stereotypes of a gay man as an effeminate “woman stuck in a male body” or as a hijra<\/a><\/em>?<\/p>\n\n My homily is coming to an end, I swear. I do have to return this soapbox before dawn, but I still feel afeard that I haven\u00c2\u2019t adequately expressed what I mean. I worry when I look around me, and see a cohort of Pakistanis who not only refuse to give a shit about what went before, but seem equally oblivious to what they\u00c2\u2019re setting themselves up for. And this sounds hypocritical, I know, given how many parties I go to and how much I drink and manage to sleep around, but here\u00c2\u2019s the critical difference (that most desis, I suspect, realise): what goes on behind the scenes doesn\u00c2\u2019t matter as long as basic appearances are met. And when those are swept aside, you get the 1980s under Zia back all over again, a decade of martial law in which there are 9 p.m. curfews, religious zealots rampaging through the streets, six-year-old kids in schools being taught how to deal with schooldays that are punctuated by lynch mobs and bomb threats (hide under the desks and pretend you\u00c2\u2019re not around, in case anyone\u00c2\u2019s curious), and everything that\u00c2\u2019s been somehow\u00c2\u2014no matter how discretely\u00c2\u2014accomplished, is left meaningless.<\/p>\n\n And believe you me, starting from scratch is a bitch and a half.<\/p>\n\n Now if one of you could help me get off this stepladder because I\u00c2\u2019m done getting over myself bayta<\/em>, that would be very nice indeed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So moving right along, the other thing that has me alternating between \u00c2\u201camused\u00c2\u201d and \u00c2\u201cseething with badly suppressed rage\u00c2\u201d is the gay scene\u00c2\u2014or lack thereof\u00c2\u2014in Karachi. Actually, that\u00c2\u2019s not entirely accurate. The socialising angle of being homosexual in Pakistan is … Continue reading cruising<\/strike> crusading for gay rights, attending and being disillusioned by HRC meetings, really fighting for a cause. For goodness\u00c2\u2019 sake, I was nicknamed \u00c2\u201cThe Queen Mother\u00c2\u201d on campus, frequently coming home late from classes to find random freshmen sitting on my couch and doing homework, or in the kitchen putting exam results up on my \u00c2\u2018fridge door, all clamouring for a biryani<\/a> dinner. Since my return to Karachi, both then and now, my interactions with an increasing number of people have led to this perpetual red cloud, this miasma of anger at the sang froid<\/em> with which I see people blithely dismissing the gay men and women of a different generation, failing to even acknowledge the difficulties that they\u00c2\u2026hell, that WE underwent, the shit we put up with and fought insofar as we could, the way we manipulated media and an assortment of social mores (and I assure you, we did, just by insisting on being who we were around our peers and their families, around our own families) so that being gay\u00c2\u2014while not overtly acceptable\u00c2\u2014was no longer one of those (pardon the pun) in-the-closet issues that no one would ever discuss or admit to. Baby steps sure, but important ones, and now I see what seems like an entirely different species nancying about, undoing everything that we tried to establish. That we weren\u00c2\u2019t attention-whores. That we\u00c2\u2019re not going to abandon the cultural values that define us because of something fundamental to our natures, but that we would try to integrate those values into the system.<\/p>\n\n